In what appears to be one of many collaborations that we can expect to come from Microsoft and Nokia, the Bing Maps and Nokia Maps teams have recently collaborated to develop — and launch across both products — a new and improved map design. Packing improvements to the road map style, typography, and the use of visual hierarchy, the update aims to, quoting the Bing announcement, “unify our map elements, improve contrast and usability to ultimately create a more beautiful and functional map.”

The color palette for the road map style has been improved, and, as a result, you will no longer mistake roads for rivers. In all seriousness, the improved colors are quite nice on the eyes, and they do not clash with overlaid data. Improvements to typography were also made; small type is now easier to read, city names are large and transparent, and their size scales with your zoom level, and type size hierarchy helps to bring order to the maps. They’ve also made improvements to the visual hierarchy — basically, what data is shown — at different zoom levels.

On top of these map improvements, they vastly improved their mapping coverage and data through their partnership with Nokia and NavTeq. As a result, map data has improved drastically in several countries, including Egypt, Israel, Malta, Philippines, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Today, in a blog post Nokia announced that a new version of the Nokia Maps Suite is now available for download for Symbian handset users. The update brings about some major changes in the Nokia Pulse app, including few login prompts, improved notifications and much more.

The update also removes the Live View app from the Nokia Maps suite, but the app is still available for download as a standalone app.

Interoperability compatible with latest versions of various Qt components, especially important because the latest Store client available this week uses a new version of a dependency that is not compatible with the previous Pulse v0.91(6)